How to Manage a Hybrid Team: 6 Tips for Returning to the Office
If your team works part-time remote and part-time onsite, it's likely that you're not all in the same place at the same time very often. For many teams returning to work after many months of working from home, a more flexible relationship with downtown office space may be the new normal.
For managers entering a hybrid workplace for the first time, the return to the office also presents a moment for reflection. Prepare yourself for the possibility that your assumptions about how to manage a hybrid team successfully may not align with the reality you find back in the office.
As someone who has been working as a manager in a hybrid workplace for years, I’ve found that this arrangement requires truly hybrid solutions to ensure that our leadership and employees maintain open channels of communication. To help you start thinking about what your new workflow will look like, here are six pieces of advice.
1. Establish Clear Expectations for Your Hybrid Team
You trust your team; they trust you. To maintain positive relationships with direct reports and to help them work effectively together even when they’re not in the same physical location, you’ll need to set clear expectations for the whole team.
Create shared routines. It can help to establish routines, which may mean setting a regular cadence of deadlines or one-on-ones, but it could also extend to having a morning check-in call that replaces your old in-person stand up.
Use project management software to increase workload visibility. If you don’t already, start using project management software like Asana or Monday to give everyone a clear sense of accountability to each other and visibility into each other’s workloads on a daily basis. By updating your calendars together on a weekly or biweekly basis, you can ensure projects keep moving forward and address roadblocks as a group.
Set best practices for communication. Should your team send a Slack, text, or e-mail if they have an urgent question? How far in advance should the event host share a meeting schedule? Everyone should know the answer to these questions and it’s best to document them in a shared location, even if that’s a shared Google Doc.
Different folks will have different comfort levels with returning to the office, so it’s a good idea to have an easily accessible schedule that shows who will be in the office and for how long. This will also help management ensure that team members are following best practices for time spent in the office.
2. Identify When and Where Extra Support Can Make a Difference
Your team members won’t all need the same level of support to thrive in a hybrid work environment, but it’s important to pay attention to high stress and high touch moments in the employee’s lifecycle (say, around their annual review) as well as in client account health.
In this moment of transition, review how your newly hybrid team treats the beginning of new projects and relationships.
Consider how you’ll onboard new employees, for example. How will you enculturate them and introduce them to a team of people they may not meet in person for months? This may be the moment to request that your team gathers in person for a half-day meeting to establish strong ties with the new hire to ensure they feel comfortable communicating over digital channels.
Whether you work in client-based accounts or focus on broaden projects, think of kickoffs in the same way you think about onboarding: How is a remote kickoff different from your old in-person meetings? Should part of the team gather in person for office-based meetings?
Perhaps in these high-stress moments, bringing more of the team together in the office will provide the social glue your staff needs to succeed.
3. Prioritize Flexibility in Scheduling and in Communications
To succeed at managing hybrid teams, you must be diligent in tracking and communicating who is doing what and where. While no one wants to be micromanaged, hybrid teams do necessitate more communication. And this matters as much to working parents who don’t have a quiet home office space as much as it matters to the employee whose home office is their sanctuary.
To ensure everyone on staff has the resources they need to accomplish deep work, talk to your team about their needs and check in on a regular basis to ensure they still have the professional office space their work requires.
4. Build Support Systems and Fun into Your Team Culture
In addition to holding space for deep work, you need to reserve time (or at least encourage) some fun. Whether you go with an occasional Zoom happy hour or a socially distanced team picnic (local health guidance permitting), plan social time into your days.
Some team-oriented companies recommend scheduling blocks of open call time, when their team can keep Zoom open while they work in order to recapture some of the camaraderie of working in the same space at the same time.
But it’s equally important that you ensure your employees know what support is available to them – and I don’t just mean their peer network. From mental health resources to the phone number to your Employee Assistance Program (EAP), this information shouldn’t only be surfaced once a year around Open Enrollment.
To manage a hybrid team successfully, promote health and wellness resources on a regular basis, and if you see a colleague struggling, let them know there is help available, wherever they’re working.
5. Emphasize Inclusion with New Protocols
In hybrid teams, there’s often a power imbalance and a perceived imbalance derived from how much facetime some employees get with their supervisors or clients.
To manage a hybrid team without limiting the opportunities of team members who are not in the office together, you’ll need to think about how your time and communications are spent with different members of your team, and how you can ensure that you’re including everyone in an equitable manner.
For example, employees who don’t want to work from home forever may be eager to return to the office and jump back into meeting rooms, but those who are hesitant may prefer to stick to video calls, even when you are all back in the office.
So, to ensure that everyone can participate in team meetings, you might make it a policy that everyone should log in individually to a team video call, so that everyone gets equal real estate in the virtual office and that everyone has the same access to the microphone.
6. Take This Opportunity to Retrain Your Aim on Equity
As you manage a team that doesn’t spend all its time in the same physical spaces, you have a tremendous opportunity to reconsider just how equitable your operations are.
As a manager, consider how you conduct your one-on-one meetings with direct reports for those who do and don’t come into the office:
When it’s time for annual reviews and evaluations, how are these conducted in a hybrid workplace?
Where are there opportunities to make the requirements for promotion clearer and more transparent?
As you revisit your project management processes and monitoring practices, consider whether you’re treating those who spend more or less time in the office differently from their counterparts. Any gaps may help reveal opportunities for growth.
Working with Remote Teams in a Hybrid Workplace Takes Skill and Patience
So many of us have become full-time remote workers in the past twelve months. For those who are transitioning back into a hybrid workplace, it’s important not to overlook the fact that we’re going through another major shift in how we and our teams operate on a daily basis.
Just like working remotely full-time and in the office, hybrid employees and their managers must master a specific set of skills for managing their time, communications, and yes, conflicts. As you remake your work-life balance again, don’t discount that this readjustment to working out of an updated headquarters for your professional life is an adjustment.
It takes time to fine-tune your managerial skills to function well in this new environment. And there is no singular way to manage a hybrid team.
If you’re still looking for a proworking space where your hybrid team can grow, book a tour of your local Firmspace.
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash